The New York Historical (NYH) in Manhattan has acquired 150 works of contemporary Native art from the chair of its board of trustees, Agnes Hsu-Tang, and her husband Oscar Tang. The landmark gift was coordinated by NYH’s chief executive, Louise Mirrer, and coincides with the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. It is the largest gift of Native art to a New York art institution since the establishment of the Museum of the American Indian.
“I rarely use the term collecting and collector,” Hsu-Tang says. “We both see ourselves as messengers… I don’t own these works of art. I’m here to be a temporary steward of these messages, and to pass on—it’s my duty to connect the past, the present and the future.”
The gifted works include pieces by Fritz Scholder (Luiseño), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish), T.C. Cannon (Kiowa), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Nampeyo of Hano (Tewa), Maria Martinez (San Ildefonso), Angel De Cora (Ho-Chunk) and Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Dakota). The gift positions NYH to tell Native history as American history rather than siloing it in specialised sections or displays. Mirrer emphasises the institution’s view of “art as a document”, framing the collection as historical testimony as much as aesthetic achievement.
“When people come to our museum and they’re looking for American history and New York history, we kind of awaken in them knowledge and learning that likely is not expected, number one, and should be expected,” Mirrer says. “People who might not find their way to the National Museum of the American Indian, but will naturally find their way to a museum around American history, especially this year, which is the 250th anniversary, will learn something that probably they didn’t anticipate learning, but is important and essential American history.”
Founded in 1804, the New York Historical (formerly the New-York Historical Society) has long been the city’s foremost history museum. The Tang gift marks its most significant effort to expand that narrative to include Native perspectives; a reframing that acknowledges Native contributions to US democratic thought, including the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy on the nation’s founding documents.
Diné Weaver, USA flag, late 19th century The New York Historical, Promised gift of Agnes Hsu-Tang and Oscar Tang, The Hsu-Tang Collection
“New York City institutions in general have just followed the path of the popular imagination for which Native art has not played a role except in the kind of banal and very stereotyped and prejudiced ways,” Mirrer says.
The 150-work gift follows a series of recent acquisitions of works by Indigenous artists at NYH, including Kay WalkingStick’s Niagara (2020) and Randee Spruce’s The Sing at Coldspring, currently on view. Discussions about the Tang gift began in 2022, when the Shinnecock ceramicist Courtney Leonard visited the institution.
This gift continues the museum’s curatorial approach in recent years, positioning Native artists in dialogue with US art-historical narratives rather than segregating them. The 2023 exhibition Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School juxtaposed the Cherokee painter’s work with the 19th-century tradition of landscape painting that typically depicted Indigenous territory as wild and uninhabited. That show, now traveling nationally, signalled an institutional willingness to complicate conventional narratives.
That approach contrasts with how some US institutions present Indigenous art. For instance the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Diker Collection, gifted in 2017, is installed in a dedicated gallery in a corner of the institution’s American wing. It is a significant acquisition, but one that remains physically and conceptually distinct from the canonical US narrative the wing tells. Native art sits adjacent to, rather than in conversation with, the Hudson River School landscapes and colonial portraiture that define the space.
Courtney M. Leonard, Contact 2,021, 2021 The New York Historical, Promised gift from Agnes Hsu-Tang in honor of her husband, Oscar L. Tang. Courtesy of the Artist, Courtney M. Leonard / Shinnecock Nation
An exhibition of works from the Tang gift, House Made of Dawn: Art by Native Americans 1880 to Now, opens on 22 April and continues through 2 August. It is curated by the museum’s chief curator Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, who is Native Hawaiian and previously staged Nature, Crisis, Consequence (2023), which placed Leonard and WalkingStick works, on loan from the Tangs, alongside Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire. Ikemoto is overseeing the gift’s integration into the permanent collection.
A ceramic work from the gift by Leonard, Contact 2,021 (2021), will greet visitors at the entrance to the museum’s new Tang Wing for American Democracy when it opens in June. The work, shaped like New York State, traces the Hudson River and reflects the Shinnecock relationship to local waters. “It’s more integrated into the collection,” Mirrer said. “It is kind of like a call to action, as you enter this new wing organised around democracy.”
The Tangs’ gift to NYH arrives amid federal pressure on institutions like the Smithsonian and the National Park Service to remove references to tribal nations, genocide and slavery. Mirrer adds: “What’s the point of having these in our institution if they don’t become part of the narrative that we tell on a regular basis?”